Category Archives: President Obama

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I’m old enough to remember when the American political and media establishment wracked itself into knots over the fact that the executive branch had been using the CIA and Hoover’s FBI to spy on domestic political opposition.

Among my earliest memories of politics and news – after Watergate, naturally – were the Church Commission hearings, which clamped down on the use of intelligence and law enforcement for domestic shenanigans.

Following months of angry claims by journalists and Democratic operatives that the Obama administration never spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times admitted Thursday that multiple overseas intelligence assets were deployed against associates of the Republican nominee. It is not the first time the Times has revealed widespread spying operations against the campaign.

In addition to noting that long-time informant Stefan Halper was tasked with collecting intelligence on the Trump campaign, the Times story details how a woman was sent overseas under a fake name and occupation to oversee the spy operation. The woman’s real name is not mentioned in the article, though the Times says she went by “Azra Turk” and has a relationship with an unidentified federal intelligence agency.

It would be the ultimate Berg’s Seventh Law reference, if it turned out that the left’s two-year-long tantrum over “collusion” were simultaneously deflection and projection.

How much of our nation’s current political, social and moral impasse traces directly to the changes Barack Obama wrought on both policy and social levels, especially in his effect on the American Left?

Even if you substantively supported Obama’s actions — as I do on legalizing the children of immigrants who are in the country illegally, for instance — the reasoning that girded these supposedly temporary executive decisions was soon revealed to be abusive. In 2012, Obama told the nation that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which by any standard was a stand-in for legislation, was merely a “temporary stopgap measure.” By the time Trump overturned it, the measure represented “who we are as a people.” That’s because by “temporary,” Obama always meant “until Democrats can make it permanent through the courts or electoral victories.”

Even when implementing laws Congress had passed, Obama and his allies relied on coercing participation through mandates. And when it became inconvenient, they began arbitrarily implementing parts of laws. Administrative discretion became administrative abuse. When the president decided the Obamacare’s employer mandate was politically inconvenient, for example, he simply skipped it for expediency.

Democrats: If you don’t like the way Trump is doing the presidency, you have only Obama to blame.

If the Palestinians heed Saudi Arabian advice to cut a deal with Israel, President Obama should get another Nobel Peace Prize.

You will recall that Obama and his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, proclaimed their intention to raise gas prices to European levels to compel Americans to drive less and thereby emit less carbon dioxide, which would save the planet from global warming. To force gas prices higher, the President refused to issue permits for oil companies to extract oil from federal lands using conventional drilling methods.

In response, oil companies were forced to develop a new technology – fracking – to extract oil from lands where they already had permits. Extracting that oil caused a glut in the oil market, which brought down oil prices worldwide, which has cut into the profits of Middle East oil-producing nations, who no longer can afford to subsidize Palestinians to terrorize Israel. Thus, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently told Palestinians to accept the United States’ peace proposal because Palestine is not a top priority for Saudi Arabia: it’s focused on Iran.

Yes, yes, the Trump Administration will try to tell you that Jared Kushner made it happen and Trump will try to claim credit for himself, but it’s immediately obvious that Barak Obama did not accidentally bring about the exact opposite result he intended; rather, he achieved his secretly intended outcome by implementing the wise policies he carefully crafted a decade ago.

It’s high time President Obama got an award for the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.

“Many people want to be authors. They crave the adulation of fans, going to cons, signing books, being able to work in their bathrobe and getting checks in the mail. Few people really want to be writers. Writers are miserable people who spend most of their time alone, have poor relations with their families and live in other worlds because this one doesn’t work for them. But to be an author you have to be a writer first.” (Paraphrase of Lois Bujold.)

I astonishes me how much law enforcement has improved during the Trump Administration. He should get more credit for it.

No, really: remember last Summer when thousands of people demonstrated against police, insisting that Black Lives Matter? They shut down Snelling for the State Fair, shut down freeways, marched all over, all the time, all for the same purpose — to protest unfair treatment of Blacks by law enforcement.

There hasn’t been one such march since Trump took office; therefore, Trump solved the problem and he ought to get credit for it.

Either that, or there never was a problem, the whole thing was a billionaire-financed fake movement intended solely to whip up minority support for the Democrat candidate for President. Now that she’s lost, there’d be no need to spend money on agitators and consequently no marches. Who could believe such a cynical thing? That can’t possibly be the reason. No, it must be all Trump’s doing. He saved the nation from a heinous and ongoing civil rights injustice. Good for him.

Joe Doakes

As we noted earlier this week, the Obama Administration’s big “victory” was fairly destroying race relations in this country.

“The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
” — Salena Zito

When Donald Trump claimed “Trump Tower had been wiretapped”, the media – awash in images of sweaty, donut-dust-stained cops hunched over in a 1974 Ford Econoline amid amplifiers and reel to reel tape decks, concentrating on conversations through headphones. And they laughed – nobody’s done that since the ’80s! Har di har!

What appears at this writing is that Trump transition team members and possibly Trump himself had their identities revealed, were “unmasked” in the parlance, while foreign diplomats were being surveilled. The identities of American citizens were not sufficiently “minimized,” as they are required to be by law. This is a crime one would assume would put the perpetrators in prison. So far it hasn’t. More than that, such behavior is a grave threat to a free society, to all of us.

In effect, Trump was wiretapped — if not in the corny, old sense of the word, something very close. Technologically, he was wiretapped, as were several (actually many) others.

A fair amount of this happened not long before Barack Obama suddenly changed the rules regarding raw intelligence, for the first time ever allowing the NSA to share its data with 16 other intelligence agencies, thus making the dissemination of said data (i. e. leaking) many times more likely. That was done on January 12, 2017, just three scant days before Trump’s inauguration. Why did the then president finally decide to make that particular change at that extremely late date, rather than on one of the previous seven years and three hundred fifty-three days of his presidency? You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or Watson to smell a rat. Something’s rotten somewhere — and it’s not Denmark.

“Obama policies kill Obama values: if you dither and appease while Russia turns Syria into a charnel house, your commitment to humane treatment of refugees will collapse under the human catastrophe resulting from your fecklessness.”

Okay, technically it’s not true. Obama’s policies were expressly designed to fundamentally transform America from the nation I grew up loving into a generic second-tier former imperial power like England, France, Spain or Italy. Sadly, he largely succeeded.

But the quip works if you replace “Obama” with “Liberal” because then you get: “Liberal policies kill Liberal values.”

Welfare intended to help families, disintegrated families.

Student loans intended to create an educated populace where students succeed, leave students ignorant and bankrupt.

Obamacare intended to make health insurance affordable, made it unaffordable.

Holy cow – this could become another Berg’s Law.

Joe Doakes

I have a hunch it’s going to be a big year for Berg’s Laws – old and new.

This is a transparently political move directed at low-information domestic audience, the people who get their news from headlines alone. Obama won’t be President this Spring so he won’t be the one keeping the promise when it comes to sending Greet Berets against Russian tanks. But if Trump doesn’t keep Obama’s promise, then Democrats will claim Trump is abandoning our allies because he’s in bed with the Russians who stole our election.

Trump should declare today that he has no intention of letting Obama start a war with Russia and then walk away leaving him holding the bag, that Trump will make his own decisions after he is inaugurated.

I expect Obama will continue to sabotage the incoming administration, not in Bill Clinton’s juvenile method of removing the “W” from all the White House keyboards, but in true tin-pot dictator style, by emptying the prisons and pardoning his henchmen.

Joe Doakes

I expect Sasha, Malia and Michelle to get a “fact-finding trip” to Monaco out of the deal in the next two weeks…

It is entirely possible, as many have argued, that Hillary Clinton would be the president-elect of the United States if the F.B.I. director, James Comey, had not sent a letter to Congress about her emails in the last weeks of the campaign.

But the electoral trends that put Donald J. Trump within striking distance of victory were clear long before Mr. Comey sent his letter. They were clear before WikiLeaks published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. They were even clear back in early July, before Mr. Comey excoriated Mrs. Clinton for using a private email server.

It was clear from the start that Mrs. Clinton was struggling to reassemble the Obama coalition.

At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin. Mrs. Clinton was also not matching Mr. Obama’s support among black voters.

The one “down side” – I”m exaggerating – to Clinton’s loss as far as I’m concerned?

We won’t be able to test my theory that, had Clinton won, all the liberal money and media love lavished on Black Lives Matter would have dried up before Hillary Clinton left the inauguration stage, because the reason George Soros was pouring megabucks into BLM was to get black voters, who’d turned out in cataclysmic numbers for Obama, to take any interest in a geriatric white patrician.

On Sunday’s season premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown,” the president discussed food and foreign policy over noodles with the celebrity chef in Vietnam…“Is ketchup on a hot dog ever acceptable?” Bourdain asked the leader of the free world in an episode taped in May.

“No,” the president quickly responded. “I mean that … that’s one of those things like, well, let me put it this way, it’s not acceptable past the age of 8.”

There are some obvious and practical reasons not to discourage President Obama’s sporting pursuits. The most obvious of them is that every hour Barack Obama spends on the links is an hour he is not wrecking the republic, distorting its character, throwing monkey wrenches into its constitutional machinery, or appointing sundry miscreants and malefactors to its high offices. If golf is the only prophylactic we have against him, then Scotland’s second-greatest contribution to modern civilization is to be celebrated for doing work that the Supreme Court and Congress can’t quite manage.

And it wasn’t money laundering either, and wasn’t done to subvert the law against providing assistance to Iran. The fact that it was done in secret, converted from fiat money to US cash to Foreign cash, in foreign banks without extradition or information sharing, was not relevant to their good intentions.

Pathetic. Who makes up these lies?

Joe Doakes

Someone who can count on the American people being badly educated, incurious, too hooked on reality TV (including a reality TV election) to pay much attention, and a media that will never, ever question him?

I recently vacationed in Mexico. The shops advertised Cuban cigars. I remember President Obama normalized relations with Cuba so Americans can now bring home Cuban cigars worth $100 for personal use. Great, I bought a box.

Except . . . I’ve learned not to trust that guy. Before I brought the cigars on the airplane, I did a little more checking. Media accounts were what I remembered but Newsweek mentioned “Americans eligible to travel to Cuba” can bring home cigars. Hang on, that’s lawyer speak, what’s that doing in the article? What does it actually mean? Finally found the Customs website.

If you buy Cuban cigars in Cuba, you can bring them home; if you buy Cuban cigars anywhere else, they’re still illegal. Attempting to bring them home is smuggling, a federal crime with a whopping fine and prison time.

Typical for this President, just like his big talk about closing Gitmo, slowing the rise of oceans, gun control . . . it’s announced to great fanfare but amounts to small beer. I left the cigars for the hotel maid in addition to the cash that I tipped her for looking after our room. I hope she finds a use for them.

Joe Doakes

Back in 2008, when people said “Obama will be a splendid president, because constitutional lawyer”, I used to respond “a President needs to know the same about the Constitution as a good cop, or maybe a high school civics teacher. Politicians who are lawyers like to play games with the law. Never trust them.”